The impact of taxation on employment and unemployment
稅收對就業和失業的影響

勘查研究(2002)試圖減少福利國家制度的經濟方法和宏觀體制方法之間的差距。不同的福利國家制度征稅在失業方面，會導致不同的經濟結果。他認為四個關鍵問題開始浮現。第一個問題就是稅收在工業化國家對就業有多么不安全？稅收應該一方面與不同類型的福利國家相聯系而在另一方面應符合勞動力市場的現狀。其次就是在一個不同的時間領域，不同的國家領域內，如何使這些影響形成差異化?這導致了尋求結構性突破和不同的管理機構治理“稅收行業環節”。“第三,哪種行業獲得的稅收最高?我們必須了解是否主要是低收入工作是更容易受稅收引導而被排擠,這是否屬于普遍水平？最后且最為重要的是是否有一個最佳的最低稅收，它能減輕效率和再分配之間的權衡?

The research done Kemmerling (2002) tries to the bridging the gap between economic approaches and macro-institutional approaches to welfare state regimes. Different regimes of welfare state taxation should lead to different economic outcomes in terms of unemployment. He considers four key questions come to the fore. First how unsafe was taxation in industrialized countries for employment? Taxation should be linked to different types of welfare states on the one hand and shape labor market outcomes on the other. Second how do these effects vary in a chronological and cross-country dimension? This leads to the search for structural breaks and different institutional settings governing the “tax-employment link.” Third which were the sectors that experience most from high taxation? It has to be shown whether low-wage jobs were mainly prone to tax-induced crowding out and whether this shows up on a collective level. Finally and most importantly was there an optimal tax-mix that mitigates the trade-off between efficiency and redistribution?
 
To a certain degree the empirical results of this paper corroborate the idea that tax-mixes matter. The importance of taxation especially of social security contributions and utilization taxes accounts for a deceleration of employment growth in OECD countries. Moreover the structure of taxation also matters for the number of unemployed people.
 
Payroll taxes which were defined as the percentage of non-wage labor costs to wages differ widely. On the one end was Denmark which charge nearly no payroll on taxes. At the other end were Italy and France which charges around 40 percent payroll taxes of total wages. The total tax load which was based on national income accounts shows a smaller amount of difference but on the other hand vary significantly (Heitger, 2002). The statistics shoes the variation from 28.7% in Australia to 70.7% in Sweden. These data point out the size of the tax wedge in the labor market—that was, compute the difference between real labor cost and real take-home pay and thus give an enhanced sense of the real tax load on labor (Nickell, 1997). The differences between Europe and non-Europe countries with respect to labor market firmness seem to be to a certain extent great. This was mainly true for OECD countries where total tax rate in 1989–94 was 48.2 percent but was 51.8 percent in Europe as compared with 37.3 percent in non-Europe.#p#分頁標題#e#
 
Kemmerling (2002) conclude that for quite some time economists had modeled the impact of taxation on unemployment or employment. The major conclusion reach was twofold: First unemployment was only reasonably influenced by taxation in the long run. Second it was the total tax burden that matters for employment but not essentially the mix of different forms of taxation. Both ideas were somewhat at odds with the resurgent discussion about the apparent “under-performance” of low-wage sectors in European economies. The usual suspect was the taxation of labor which was in the forms of income taxes or social security contributions. But how do consumption taxes fit into this picture? Prima facie should be particularly harmful for these sectors because it reduces both the demand and supply for low-wage labor (e.g. Scharp, 2000a).
 
The basic framework for an analysis of the incidence of taxation was the standard microeconomic approach to labor supply. Taxation leads ceteris paribus to a changeover effect: work was moreover replaced by more spare time by other sources of income or by an increased amount of work in the future (Gustafsson, 1996:; Blundell, and MaCurdy, 1999). It had also leaded to the utilization of goods that were less labor-intensive. The main underlying mechanism was a “wedge” between gross and net wages. A lower net wage leads to a smaller supply of labor. Only if the income effect (IE) of taxation surpasses the substitution effect (SE) does the labor supply increase. Micro econometric studies had shown that certainly for some social groups such as single mothers IE dominates SE (e.g. Blundell, 1995). Kemmerling (2002) had expected a more customary scenario on an aggregate level for whole sectors of an economy or even for the entire labor market.